14 DAY TRIAL // Have you ever wondered how the human and animal behaviour is analyzed, or why it takes so much time to study things that seem simple at first sight? When we talk about science and we have computers and sensors involved, then nothing can happen over night. Data visualisation is concerned with the presentation of interactive or animated digital images to users in order to understand data.
For example, scientists interpret potentially huge quantities of laboratory or simulation data, as well as the results taken from various sensors to aid their research, and behaviour patterns are much easier to study using data mining. Today, I have an interesting program to tell you about, and its purpose is exactly to help extracting data from audio and video sources.
SaySoSoft is the company that released Annotation, a software for the Mac designed for use in human and animal behavioral labs at major research institutions. Although we're talking about a scientific application, Annotation is really easy to use and has a user-friendly interface that allows you to code events in terms of their type, onset and duration.
Annotation can be used to generate organized audio and video clips, to extract complex events structures for further analysis using your favorite statistics software, as well as to graphically visualize your data to easily distinguish patterns.
Using this program, you can easily load and score any audio or video file that plays in QuickTime, and even code events as they unfold in real time or if you have multimedia you want to code off an external source, such as a TV monitor or stereo. Event data can be exported to CSV, so you will be able to easily load it in Excel, Stata or SPSS afterwards.
Annotation 1.0 comes as a Universal Binary that runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run properly. The price of a single user license is 300$, while a five users license is priced at 700$.